Also, the OAC post I mentioned yesterday afternoon is now up.

Are you aware of any organizations that are fighting the OAC that are in need to donations?

It’s not precisely a lawsuit, but advocates have filed a complaint with the Federal Transit Administration, arguing that the OAC implementation violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. If the FTA agrees, that would jeopardize some of the funding. There are a few ways that this project could still be slowed down or even effectively stopped in spite of BART, and that is another avenue being pursued.

I can’t believe the OAC may actually benefit from AC Transit’s financial difficulties! Is anybody talking lawsuit against the OAC? So many better projects get delayed or killed over lawsuits, maybe for once a lawsuit can be used for the benefit of transit.

There’s no motivation for Heminger or MTC to be accountable. Heminger himself isn’t elected, and I would wager only a small percentage of the Bay Area has even heard of him, let alone have any sense of what his priorities are. MTC Commissioners are largely elected officials, but those are held accountable by what they do in their own jurisdictions, not based on their votes at MTC, which are also generally unknown to the population at large.

I used the word “ostensible” to describe the “sustainable plan” that Heminger demanded of AC Transit, because it’s more likely he’d rather just have the RM2 capital dollars go somewhere else, i.e. BART. There’s not really another reasonable explanation for why these two pots of money were tied together, except that Heminger wanted RM2, and used the short-term (3-year) usage of CMAQ as the excuse to demand a long-term plan. Unless you’re hostile to relatively inexpensive, but nonetheless useful, urban transit projects, there’s little reason to demand that ACT gut its single major project-in-planning for the sake of a “sustainable long-term financial plan” to solve problems that have arisen from what will probably be a short-term economic downturn. The sad part is that this really is only the latest in a long string of similar funding maneuvers in the past.

BART Warm Springs.

Caldecott tunnel.

BART Monorail monorail monorail.

Scandalously, utterly appallingly bad recent BATA bond interest rate mismanagement coverup.

TransLink(tm).

Unusable 511.org run by military contractors

How about over a hundred million dollars of potentially transit-benefiting tolls simply GIVEN AWAY as FasTrak(tm) discounts, for no purpose whatsoever other than to make MTC-staff-reported uptake rates look good? If I were to ask with a straight face for a $100m for an advertising campaign for FasTrak(c)(r) I’d be laughed out of the room, but this is in effect what BATA (ie MTC executive staff’s) toll giveaways have done … at the same time they cry poor mouth when any urban transit operator seeks any financial assistance.

The criminal Dumbarton rail takedown.

Oh, and that little detail of the $5 BILLION DOLLAR overrun on the Bay Bridge East Span — the same span for which Heminger (MTC point person and puppet master on the so-called Bay Bridge Design Task Force of the late 1990s) and his mentor Larry Dahms rigged an in-house-only “competition” and which they promised on a stack of bibles would be delivered for $1bn, and less than any possible sort of retrofit. Where’s the accountability?

Basically, anybody Steve Heminger wants to reward (ie BART contractors, Cubic, the Seismic Retrofit Sopranos who’ve never once delivered anything near budget, etc) gets anything they want courtesy of his personal $750,000 per day toll slush fund. Anything he doesn’t like (ie Caltrain, anything that involves a nasty old stinky old BUS or anything that benefits transit users more than construction contractors) gets the complete shaft.

Somebody should do some digging.

A pity we don’t have any newspapers around here, or any politicians (outside of Bates from Berkeley) sitting on MTC who aren’t either co-opted by staff, on the take (what is it with the permanent SF Mayor’s “representative” at MTC anyway?), mentally incapable, or comatose.

(In the Small Starts proposal, the exact numbers are 585,000 transit trips per day in 2015 without BRT and 594,000 transit trips per day with BRT. Since most folks make a round trip, 1 rider = 2 transit trips. Thus 9000 additional transit trips per day = 4500 additional transit riders.)

It is hard for me to believe that there isn’t another more cost-effective way to entice more people to use public transit.

I am not against the 1R, just that it has had problems, and as it is the corridor route for BRT it is ironic that they have no ostensible plans for it. Such as, splitting it in two. It suffers specifically from being too long while the 51, which they are splitting, suffers due to congestion on College Ave.

Yes, trams would cost more (a lot more) but you do get something for that money. Diesel buses (and even natural gas ones) really don’t mix with a dense urban environment- yes lots of cities use them. Perhaps, guided trolley buses might be a cheaper solution, but diesel BRT is largely a suburban solution.

PS. There is a new BRT project in Cambridge (UK) that, to my mind, better utilises the advantages of BRT technology- it uses guided buses.